Wow i actually got around to doing this. Now. In someone elses house. On someone ELSES computer. When i should be studying. But thats exactly how spontaneity works.
SO where do i start. Ill start with something as mundane as the weather. Apart from the fact that the temperature fluctuates by an average of 25C every single day, at least, and apart from the fact that wind chill instantaneously drops the temp by a further 10C, and apart from the fact you reeeally dont wanna get caught in the rain in this weather, its all good. Just make sure you folks from the equator are wearin 3 shirts and 2 full pants on a warm day to avoid hypothermia. Nah jus kidding, you need 4 each.
The temperature here, or rather the lack of, is made up for by the people though. Apart from the heat generated under the covers on a warm alcohol drenched night, the warmth of the general population even during the day is refreshing after the cold shoulders you get every single day at SBS bus in ye olde Singapore. Case in point, i talked to more people during Orientation WEEK than i had in 6 yrs of school in SG. And i got more proper friends after a month here than after 2 yrs at VJC. Whether thats my own fault or not shall be debated here.
But orientation was awesome. On hindsight the games were pretty retarded but when you got almost no friends at all in a country 11000 miles from home, they seem more fun than 2 trips to Disneyland. Okay, bad example but whatever. They were fun.
But the funs gotta end someday and here i am smack in the middle of work (which im not doing cuz im writing this right now, yes i DO understand self-reference) and exams and lectures. Now that the teachers dont give a crap whether ppl sleep i try to my best, to little success, to keep myself awake.
On my penultimate note, some of the smartasses here are seriously freakin me out with their effortless 95+++s and their 2-3 page long SUMMARISED resumes. But whatever, im not gonna take shit from anyone. I just need to find my placing and ill be up there with the elites. And on a final note, i miss my parents a lot. My mom more. Never in my life thought id feel this way. Damn i wish touchable holograms had been invented. Its just not the same knowing shes not making my meals, telling me to study and not screw around, looking out for me etc etc. What makes it worse is that she prolly feels the same way too. Ah well, gotta hang in there for.... 7 months. No problem, its in the bag. Lets see if i can update before that.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Thursday, August 31, 2006
The evil within
While springcleaning I found an article I wrote many years ago and thought I'd save it here for future reference. Considering how young and stupid I was way back then, I'd say its pretty good.
"Werewolves, vampires, witches etc. do not exist in reality but exist as a horrible concept: that the deeper darker side of ourselves, our id, can and will eventually take over and bring us down to the level of beasts. This is a subconscious feeling, so we are not aware of anything more than a feeling of impending doom while watching horror movies. Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde is an example of how all of us badly want to shed our shackles of dignity and become free to do as we wish. Interestingly the concept of one becoming a werewolf or vampire for eternity after being bitten spawned from the contagiousness of losing control and never gaining it back.
Isnt it strange, therefore, that society as a whole would shun all who lose control - misfits, "vampires", and "werewolves" - when all of us are guilty of an underlying desire for chaos? Perhaps we wish to extract our id from ourselevs and pin it wholly on misfits. We hate to think that we ourselves are to blame for social evils, so we blame Hitler, Dracula, Satan and the like.
And yet, after these evil epitomes are purged from society, evil still lurks in the minds of every single individual in society. The desire to break away from society and fend for oneself at the expense of society remains. Perhaps that explains why, at the end of every horrow movie, after the monster or "source of evil" has been killed, a gnawing feeling remains that perhaps, the evil has not left after all."
Friday, August 25, 2006
Morphology with biology
Just had a funny realization. I always wondered what was UP with pet animals, animal rights and their activitists. I mean, its just not Nature's way for animals to look out for other species. And its even more wierd when these fellas start getting all huffy about certain types of rhinos or monkeys or manatees in isolated parts of the world becoming extinct while at the same time, rats, mosquitoes, cockroaches etc are massacred by the billions. Why the double-standards? Or in this case, septuple-standards? If we ARE superior to all other living creatures then so be it. Yeah yeah, we've all heard the our-ecosystem-will-be-affected routine, though its kinda hard for me to understand how the loss of some pandas in the jungles of central Asia will affect me more than the gleeful slaughter of cockroaches in my apartment. Not that i'm complaining.
Somewhere deep in my subconscious its been drilled in by didactic primary school teachers that "Human beings must protect the environment and animals around them." but it never occurred to me then the sheeer hypocricy of hearing this rattled out inside a concrete rainforest. And then teachers would show pictures of cute furry things on the brink of erasure to tug our heart strings, while outside there'd be fogging going on. It just didn make sense.
And THEN it hit me. 15 minutes ago. Anthropomorphism. It's all about anthropomorphism. Innately humans dont really care about other species. I mean come on, who're we kidding? But when we start to see human-like characteristics in animals, particularly dogs or cats or dolphins, we feel some kind of camaraderie. No other reason why theyre common pets. Those wierdos who keep anacondas, armadillos or three-toed sloths as pets only do so coz they can see human qualities in them, albeit qualities not immediately apparent to the next man. And for this same reason, the SPCA does not look after reptiles, insects or sewer rats as no one in their right mind could discern human qualities in them. Possibly because of their ridiculous breeding cycle.
The biggest joke about all of this is that this is all based on perceptions. Too many are oblivious to the obvious; animals do not, by defintion, have human qualities. We just like to look for em. All you need is one single video of a chimpanzee mauling an innocent (human) kid and no one would notice within days that theyre off the food chain. Anyone up for Jaws, anyone?
Somewhere deep in my subconscious its been drilled in by didactic primary school teachers that "Human beings must protect the environment and animals around them." but it never occurred to me then the sheeer hypocricy of hearing this rattled out inside a concrete rainforest. And then teachers would show pictures of cute furry things on the brink of erasure to tug our heart strings, while outside there'd be fogging going on. It just didn make sense.
And THEN it hit me. 15 minutes ago. Anthropomorphism. It's all about anthropomorphism. Innately humans dont really care about other species. I mean come on, who're we kidding? But when we start to see human-like characteristics in animals, particularly dogs or cats or dolphins, we feel some kind of camaraderie. No other reason why theyre common pets. Those wierdos who keep anacondas, armadillos or three-toed sloths as pets only do so coz they can see human qualities in them, albeit qualities not immediately apparent to the next man. And for this same reason, the SPCA does not look after reptiles, insects or sewer rats as no one in their right mind could discern human qualities in them. Possibly because of their ridiculous breeding cycle.
The biggest joke about all of this is that this is all based on perceptions. Too many are oblivious to the obvious; animals do not, by defintion, have human qualities. We just like to look for em. All you need is one single video of a chimpanzee mauling an innocent (human) kid and no one would notice within days that theyre off the food chain. Anyone up for Jaws, anyone?
Friday, August 18, 2006
A Mathematical Romance
I found this somewhere, thought it was pretty creative and funny.
They both originated at (0,0) and from then on, they integrated up to infinity. Her curves were continuously varying, and even though he was odd, he was the real function. The day their lines first intersected, they became an ordered pair. She was his f(x), he was her g(x), and henceforth, fg became a valid function for all real x. They were both in their prime, so in next to no time their lines became horizontal and parallel. Soon they became coincident. She was awed by the magnitude of the normal to his plane, and he was amazed by the integrated volume of her conical projections. "Bisect my angle!" she postulated each time she reached her local maximum. He taught her the chain rule as she implicitly defined the amplitude and, more importantly, the frequency of his simple harmonic motion. The forced oscillations made them undergo multiple rotations about their axes, while arbitrarily heading them towards their collective asymptote, until at last they reached the vertex, the critical point, their finite limit. After that they slept like logarithms.
But before the next period of this cyclic event could begin, he realized she was too complex to handle while he seemed plain irrational to her. Later she found him taking a right-handed limit, that was a problem, because it was an improper form. He meanwhile had decided that she was square. He gave her the slip below the x axis while simultaneously, she approached her ex, and so they became divergent.
They both originated at (0,0) and from then on, they integrated up to infinity. Her curves were continuously varying, and even though he was odd, he was the real function. The day their lines first intersected, they became an ordered pair. She was his f(x), he was her g(x), and henceforth, fg became a valid function for all real x. They were both in their prime, so in next to no time their lines became horizontal and parallel. Soon they became coincident. She was awed by the magnitude of the normal to his plane, and he was amazed by the integrated volume of her conical projections. "Bisect my angle!" she postulated each time she reached her local maximum. He taught her the chain rule as she implicitly defined the amplitude and, more importantly, the frequency of his simple harmonic motion. The forced oscillations made them undergo multiple rotations about their axes, while arbitrarily heading them towards their collective asymptote, until at last they reached the vertex, the critical point, their finite limit. After that they slept like logarithms.
But before the next period of this cyclic event could begin, he realized she was too complex to handle while he seemed plain irrational to her. Later she found him taking a right-handed limit, that was a problem, because it was an improper form. He meanwhile had decided that she was square. He gave her the slip below the x axis while simultaneously, she approached her ex, and so they became divergent.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Awesome pickup
I've heard enough dumb and cliched pickup lines for the next two... no, three lifetimes. Regardless of whether reincarnation really happens. Hearing dumbass "playas" say things like "Are your legs tired? Coz you've been running through my mind all day." and "Got a map? I'm lost in your eyes." when I'm at a bar really makes my blood boil. The only remedy for my pain is hearing the woman give a crushing reply to these people, it just makes my day worthwhile.
Thats why, illogically, I decided to compile a list of awesomely BAD pickup lines and crushing replies by women. For future reference and present humour.
(Courtesy of pickuphelp.com, I only took the best of the best coz 90% of this webpage is forgettable.)
The BAD (each worthy of at least one bitchslap)
1. If you were a booger I'd pick you first.
2. Baby did you fart, 'cause you blow me away!
3. Hey baby, you've got something on your butt: my eyes.
4. You're like a prize winning fish... I dont know whether to eat you or mount you.
5. My love for you is like diareah..it never ends! (its diarrhoea, i know)
6. What has 142 teeth and holds back the incredible hulk? My zipper.
7. He: Is that shirt felt?
She: No
He: Would you like it to be?
8. Your mom was pretty good, so i figured you would be too.
9. You remind me of cheese... I LIKE cheese.
10. My names mickey are you my minnie? (Now THAT's comedy)
11. You must be good at the flute cause you sure charm my snake.
12. Excuse me... do you speak Klingon? (applauds)
13. I have a cat. She would really like to meet you.
14. My leech would like you as a new host.
15. If I followed you home, would you keep me?
16. You'll do.
The Replies
Guy: If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put I and U togather
Girl: Oh really, because if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put F and U together.
He: Haven't I seen you someplace before?
She: Yeah, that's why I don't go there anymore.
He: Is this seat empty?
She: Yes, and this one will be too if you sit down.
He: So, wanna go back to my place?
She: I don't know. Will two people fit under a rock?
He: I'd like to call you. What's your number?
She: It's in the phone book.
He: But I don't know your name.
She: That's in the phone book too.
He: What sign were you born under?
She: No Parking.
He: Hey, baby, What's your sign?
She: Stop.
He: Hey cutie, how 'bout you and I hitting the hot spots?
She: Sorry, I don't date outside my species.
He: So, baby, your place or mine?
She: Both. You'll go to your place and I'll go to mine.
He: Haven't we met before?
She: Yes, I'm the receptionist at the V.D. Clinic.
These pickups are not bad though.
I noticed you noticing me and I wanted you to know that its notified.
Hi, I'm Will... God's Will.
You are the proof that God has a sense of humor.
How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice- can I get your name and number?
And...
Guy: Do you like to dance?
Likely Answers: Yes/ Maybe/ Not with you/ **** Off
Guy: Well then, could you go dance so I can talk to your hot friend?
(revenge is sweet)
Thats why, illogically, I decided to compile a list of awesomely BAD pickup lines and crushing replies by women. For future reference and present humour.
(Courtesy of pickuphelp.com, I only took the best of the best coz 90% of this webpage is forgettable.)
The BAD (each worthy of at least one bitchslap)
1. If you were a booger I'd pick you first.
2. Baby did you fart, 'cause you blow me away!
3. Hey baby, you've got something on your butt: my eyes.
4. You're like a prize winning fish... I dont know whether to eat you or mount you.
5. My love for you is like diareah..it never ends! (its diarrhoea, i know)
6. What has 142 teeth and holds back the incredible hulk? My zipper.
7. He: Is that shirt felt?
She: No
He: Would you like it to be?
8. Your mom was pretty good, so i figured you would be too.
9. You remind me of cheese... I LIKE cheese.
10. My names mickey are you my minnie? (Now THAT's comedy)
11. You must be good at the flute cause you sure charm my snake.
12. Excuse me... do you speak Klingon? (applauds)
13. I have a cat. She would really like to meet you.
14. My leech would like you as a new host.
15. If I followed you home, would you keep me?
16. You'll do.
The Replies
Guy: If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put I and U togather
Girl: Oh really, because if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put F and U together.
He: Haven't I seen you someplace before?
She: Yeah, that's why I don't go there anymore.
He: Is this seat empty?
She: Yes, and this one will be too if you sit down.
He: So, wanna go back to my place?
She: I don't know. Will two people fit under a rock?
He: I'd like to call you. What's your number?
She: It's in the phone book.
He: But I don't know your name.
She: That's in the phone book too.
He: What sign were you born under?
She: No Parking.
He: Hey, baby, What's your sign?
She: Stop.
He: Hey cutie, how 'bout you and I hitting the hot spots?
She: Sorry, I don't date outside my species.
He: So, baby, your place or mine?
She: Both. You'll go to your place and I'll go to mine.
He: Haven't we met before?
She: Yes, I'm the receptionist at the V.D. Clinic.
These pickups are not bad though.
I noticed you noticing me and I wanted you to know that its notified.
Hi, I'm Will... God's Will.
You are the proof that God has a sense of humor.
How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice- can I get your name and number?
And...
Guy: Do you like to dance?
Likely Answers: Yes/ Maybe/ Not with you/ **** Off
Guy: Well then, could you go dance so I can talk to your hot friend?
(revenge is sweet)
Life
The epitome of self-reference systems; a life-form talking about life itself.
But after watching Saw a second time, I realized that life is literally taken for granted. How often have we wondered about what it REALLY means to be alive? We go on obliviously through our time spans continuously looking for that greener grass on the other side, basically walking in circles. While, in fact, fulfiling the needs of others. That Harvard/Yale/Mit degree doesnt give YOU anything, it just gives society another sucker to push around slightly more than others.
And when we start to look after our OWN needs, we end up killing oursleves slowly through pleasure. To some its drugs, to some more its cigarretes, booze for even more and neuron-killing television for almost all the rest. We continuously breathe in carbon, sulphur and nitrous oxides while soaking in electromagnetic radiation either from billions of coulombs of charge from household wiring everyday or through cell-phone reception. Some of the many benefits of living in modern society. My eye cells are being cauterised as I write this, and so are yours. Right now.
Pleasure defines ALL our voluntary actions. Whatever we do willingly is to increase our own pleasure, directly or indirectly. But pain defines our existence. Forget those retarded deluded kids who slit themselves, this applies to everyone. The only time we are glad to be alive is immediately after feeling physical pain. Like after I nearly passed out after gym and had to breathe like a fish without gills for an hour. Or when the bottom half of my big toe got cut neatly off and I had to "walk" 2k home. Lets not forget the compounded chickenpox. I had rarely ever felt more alive. This is true only for physical pain, mind you. Psychological pain affects the very organ responsible for making us want to live.
Which explains why it may be possible for a rich white kid with a good family from a suburban neighbourhood to slit or kill himself while a sane individual stranded in a desert or island with little to live for will still exercise every possible means to escape and live. Even if it involves pain.
Pun intended, this is the painful reality of our existence.
The single most defining characteristic of life is its desire to remain... alive. (assuming that the organism's CPU is functioning normally).
The single greatest mystery about life, in fact, is life itself.
But after watching Saw a second time, I realized that life is literally taken for granted. How often have we wondered about what it REALLY means to be alive? We go on obliviously through our time spans continuously looking for that greener grass on the other side, basically walking in circles. While, in fact, fulfiling the needs of others. That Harvard/Yale/Mit degree doesnt give YOU anything, it just gives society another sucker to push around slightly more than others.
And when we start to look after our OWN needs, we end up killing oursleves slowly through pleasure. To some its drugs, to some more its cigarretes, booze for even more and neuron-killing television for almost all the rest. We continuously breathe in carbon, sulphur and nitrous oxides while soaking in electromagnetic radiation either from billions of coulombs of charge from household wiring everyday or through cell-phone reception. Some of the many benefits of living in modern society. My eye cells are being cauterised as I write this, and so are yours. Right now.
Pleasure defines ALL our voluntary actions. Whatever we do willingly is to increase our own pleasure, directly or indirectly. But pain defines our existence. Forget those retarded deluded kids who slit themselves, this applies to everyone. The only time we are glad to be alive is immediately after feeling physical pain. Like after I nearly passed out after gym and had to breathe like a fish without gills for an hour. Or when the bottom half of my big toe got cut neatly off and I had to "walk" 2k home. Lets not forget the compounded chickenpox. I had rarely ever felt more alive. This is true only for physical pain, mind you. Psychological pain affects the very organ responsible for making us want to live.
Which explains why it may be possible for a rich white kid with a good family from a suburban neighbourhood to slit or kill himself while a sane individual stranded in a desert or island with little to live for will still exercise every possible means to escape and live. Even if it involves pain.
Pun intended, this is the painful reality of our existence.
The single most defining characteristic of life is its desire to remain... alive. (assuming that the organism's CPU is functioning normally).
The single greatest mystery about life, in fact, is life itself.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
The Gateway to Heaven
I wasnt expecting to post twice on the same day but man, this has got to be one of the most mind-numbingly astounding articles. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
Prestigious Singapore School
Sends Droves to Top Colleges;
Just $15 a Month in Fees
By CRIS PRYSTAY and ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 6, 2004; Page B1
Teh Su Ching began gunning for the Ivy League when she was just 11 years old. To get there, the young Singaporean beefed up her grades to win admission to a feeder school for Singapore's Raffles Junior College, the government school that landed her older brother in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other graduates in a host of top universities abroad.
A few weeks ago, Ms. Teh, now 19, was accepted by Yale. "I screamed when I found out," she says. Then she went down to Raffles and gave her teachers flowers and bottles of wine.
The school has plenty of reason to celebrate. Over 40% of the 820 students who graduated in December have been accepted by top U.S. universities. About half of that group will attend elite, Ivy League schools. Cornell University alone accepted 90 of Ms. Teh's classmates; Duke University accepted another 24. Dozens of others this year have been accepted by Britain's Oxford and Cambridge.
Raffles charges students just $15 a month in fees, but it's no ordinary institution. A product of Singapore's highly competitive approach to education, designed to fuel the national economy, Raffles is the peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pushes the cream to the top.
---------------"abridged"----------------
Another key to Raffles' extraordinary college-placement success: Money is no object. To groom leaders for its agencies and the companies under its control, the government underwrites the college education of hundreds of top Singaporean junior-college graduates. Students seeking such aid must sign a contract, or a bond, to come back and work for a government agency or corporation for six years. More than half of the Raffles grads who are heading to the U.S. this year are on a government bond, the school says.
"It makes it a little easier for us to accept them," acknowledges Mike Goldberger, director of admission at Brown University, which has a limited financial-aid budget for international students.
Raffles Junior College, established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raffles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Yew, the patriarch of modern Singapore.
Today's Raffles is an Ivy League machine. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of high schools that feed elite U.S. colleges focused on U.S. schools and thus didn't include Raffles. Adding international schools, that list shows that Raffles sent more students to 10 elite colleges than any other international school and topped such prestigious U.S. secondary schools as Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., and Harvard-Westlake, in North Hollywood, Calif.
"It's very satisfying," says Winston James Hodge, the school's principal and a Singaporean like most of the faculty.
---------------"abridged"----------------
University applications are taken extra-seriously. There are five teachers who serve as applications advisers, two for U.S. universities, two for schools in the United Kingdom and one for Australian schools. Between July and October, there is at least one talk each week by Ivy League alumni or an admissions officer from a U.S. school.
Those talks motivated Ervin Yeo, 20, now a freshman at Yale studying ethics, politics and economics. "When you hear all these success stories and hear about the students before you who go on to Princeton and Harvard, you feel you can be part of this," says Mr. Yeo, who is the first in his immediate family to go to college.
---------------"abridged"----------------
Mr. Yeo, who played rugby at Raffles and now does so at Yale, says the transition has been easy. "You're used to being the cream of the crop in Singapore," he says, "and it's just the same thing at the Ivies."
(for full unabridged article, go to this website)
That is some inspirational stuff. Its so heartening to know that there are so many people out there to nurture the individual to attain his full potential. I'm just.. slightly curious about how quickly one's perspective of everything changes with tangible achievements.
If I had read this article 2 years ago, my weak self-esteem would have been ruthlessly blown away. Now of course, I have come to grips with my own paranoid delusions about life and totem poles.
I wont belabour my point too much coz a lot of people have talked about this already. But, upon replacing my glasses for myopia with far-vision goggles, I envision Singapore becoming trapped by its own pyramidal heirarchy. The same thing that strangled ancient Indian society. A society led by Rafflesians in the service of everyone, including and especially Rafflesians, who later carry the torch of progress forward. Sure Singapore is an "egalitarian" society. But we all know what George Orwell said about THAT.
WORLD NEWS
Gateway to the Ivy League
Prestigious Singapore School
Sends Droves to Top Colleges;
Just $15 a Month in Fees
By CRIS PRYSTAY and ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 6, 2004; Page B1
Teh Su Ching began gunning for the Ivy League when she was just 11 years old. To get there, the young Singaporean beefed up her grades to win admission to a feeder school for Singapore's Raffles Junior College, the government school that landed her older brother in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other graduates in a host of top universities abroad.
A few weeks ago, Ms. Teh, now 19, was accepted by Yale. "I screamed when I found out," she says. Then she went down to Raffles and gave her teachers flowers and bottles of wine.
The school has plenty of reason to celebrate. Over 40% of the 820 students who graduated in December have been accepted by top U.S. universities. About half of that group will attend elite, Ivy League schools. Cornell University alone accepted 90 of Ms. Teh's classmates; Duke University accepted another 24. Dozens of others this year have been accepted by Britain's Oxford and Cambridge.
Raffles charges students just $15 a month in fees, but it's no ordinary institution. A product of Singapore's highly competitive approach to education, designed to fuel the national economy, Raffles is the peak of a government-controlled pyramid-style school structure that unabashedly pushes the cream to the top.
---------------"abridged"----------------
Another key to Raffles' extraordinary college-placement success: Money is no object. To groom leaders for its agencies and the companies under its control, the government underwrites the college education of hundreds of top Singaporean junior-college graduates. Students seeking such aid must sign a contract, or a bond, to come back and work for a government agency or corporation for six years. More than half of the Raffles grads who are heading to the U.S. this year are on a government bond, the school says.
"It makes it a little easier for us to accept them," acknowledges Mike Goldberger, director of admission at Brown University, which has a limited financial-aid budget for international students.
Raffles Junior College, established in 1982, has its roots in Raffles Institution, a secondary school for boys established in 1823 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial Briton who founded the city-state of Singapore. Raffles Institution, which still exists, built its reputation as a bastion of meritocracy, accepting gifted children from all socioeconomic classes and producing dozens of leaders over the years -- among them, Lee Kuan Yew, the patriarch of modern Singapore.
Today's Raffles is an Ivy League machine. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of high schools that feed elite U.S. colleges focused on U.S. schools and thus didn't include Raffles. Adding international schools, that list shows that Raffles sent more students to 10 elite colleges than any other international school and topped such prestigious U.S. secondary schools as Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., and Harvard-Westlake, in North Hollywood, Calif.
"It's very satisfying," says Winston James Hodge, the school's principal and a Singaporean like most of the faculty.
---------------"abridged"----------------
University applications are taken extra-seriously. There are five teachers who serve as applications advisers, two for U.S. universities, two for schools in the United Kingdom and one for Australian schools. Between July and October, there is at least one talk each week by Ivy League alumni or an admissions officer from a U.S. school.
Those talks motivated Ervin Yeo, 20, now a freshman at Yale studying ethics, politics and economics. "When you hear all these success stories and hear about the students before you who go on to Princeton and Harvard, you feel you can be part of this," says Mr. Yeo, who is the first in his immediate family to go to college.
---------------"abridged"----------------
Mr. Yeo, who played rugby at Raffles and now does so at Yale, says the transition has been easy. "You're used to being the cream of the crop in Singapore," he says, "and it's just the same thing at the Ivies."
(for full unabridged article, go to this website)
That is some inspirational stuff. Its so heartening to know that there are so many people out there to nurture the individual to attain his full potential. I'm just.. slightly curious about how quickly one's perspective of everything changes with tangible achievements.
If I had read this article 2 years ago, my weak self-esteem would have been ruthlessly blown away. Now of course, I have come to grips with my own paranoid delusions about life and totem poles.
I wont belabour my point too much coz a lot of people have talked about this already. But, upon replacing my glasses for myopia with far-vision goggles, I envision Singapore becoming trapped by its own pyramidal heirarchy. The same thing that strangled ancient Indian society. A society led by Rafflesians in the service of everyone, including and especially Rafflesians, who later carry the torch of progress forward. Sure Singapore is an "egalitarian" society. But we all know what George Orwell said about THAT.
Monday, August 07, 2006
The Consumer's Odyssey
How the hell do females do it? How the hell do they make a physically and emotionally draining experience into a social activity as well as an obsession? Are we THAT different? If chimpanzees are within 0.01% of our genetic make-up, maybe the assumption that we are more similar to female humans than chimpanzees is no longer valid.
I was talking about shopping of course. The word conjures images of Marlon and Shawn screeching that word in a retarded falsetto while looking like pale freaks of nature. What normal males view as a functional activity I view as a means to lose all your hard-earned and precious moolah while at the same time feeling surges of inferiority at being unable to acquire really cool stuff. There is simply no way to find middle ground between two such conflicting feelings. Its like I'm a miser and a member of the proletariat simultaneously. And when the daunting task of buying all the necessary supplies for a 5 year stint in a country where polar bears might survive falls on you, its Homer's odyssey all over again. After 4 hours of gruelling battle I was able to vanquish that one-eyed monster called consumerism. There's no chance of Homer turning in his grave because he was never buried.
Women women women. Cant understand em, cant stand em, and cant stay without em. But thats another story.
I was talking about shopping of course. The word conjures images of Marlon and Shawn screeching that word in a retarded falsetto while looking like pale freaks of nature. What normal males view as a functional activity I view as a means to lose all your hard-earned and precious moolah while at the same time feeling surges of inferiority at being unable to acquire really cool stuff. There is simply no way to find middle ground between two such conflicting feelings. Its like I'm a miser and a member of the proletariat simultaneously. And when the daunting task of buying all the necessary supplies for a 5 year stint in a country where polar bears might survive falls on you, its Homer's odyssey all over again. After 4 hours of gruelling battle I was able to vanquish that one-eyed monster called consumerism. There's no chance of Homer turning in his grave because he was never buried.
Women women women. Cant understand em, cant stand em, and cant stay without em. But thats another story.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Memory
I simply cannot decide whether memory is a good or bad property of our incomprehensible minds. Why the hell is it impossible to remember important stuff like birthdates or anniverseries (which are important to some people), deadlines, documentation and billions of other things which might actually have bearing on your life? Instead, I seem to remember some trauma-inducing comments made by nursery or kindergarten teachers aeons ago and other random scraps of data (not information) which I have tried to suppress from reoccurring in my mind but failed. Maybe the very act of suppression causes reinforcement, which, on a macro scale would explain why censorship and draconian rulers are meant to fail.
I would also very much like to forget the fact that my uncle once said that "Birth is evitable but death is inevitable." Was probably the last thing I remember him saying, which was, relativistically speaking, aeons ago. Relative to my own perseption of course.
(Sorry Mr Albert, if I just made you do a 180.)
What purpose does memory serve? Does the past have any bearing on the future? Sure people will say without knowledge of the past, we make the same mistakes in the future. But how the hell do you avoid the mistake of dying? And whether its a mistake in the first place is a different story altogether.
Ah enough of this necromaniac rants. Gotta move on with life and all that shit-fuck. Sounds condolencing when you say it but hollow when you hear it.
Selective amnesia should be made into an over-the-counter pill. Sometimes I wonder what these fools in bio-med are really doing.
I would also very much like to forget the fact that my uncle once said that "Birth is evitable but death is inevitable." Was probably the last thing I remember him saying, which was, relativistically speaking, aeons ago. Relative to my own perseption of course.
(Sorry Mr Albert, if I just made you do a 180.)
What purpose does memory serve? Does the past have any bearing on the future? Sure people will say without knowledge of the past, we make the same mistakes in the future. But how the hell do you avoid the mistake of dying? And whether its a mistake in the first place is a different story altogether.
Ah enough of this necromaniac rants. Gotta move on with life and all that shit-fuck. Sounds condolencing when you say it but hollow when you hear it.
Selective amnesia should be made into an over-the-counter pill. Sometimes I wonder what these fools in bio-med are really doing.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
The final frontier
You know, we all think we know what death is. We all tell other afflicted people not to feel sad, to imagine that the one they lost is in a better place etc etc. Philosophers imagine that the all-important soul, or the intangible manifestation of the sense of being, rises above the physical plane and arrives at another and blah blah. End of the day, none of this ranting matters.
Because when you hear the phone ring, pick it up and hear that hollow voice telling you that so-and-so is not in THIS physical plane anymore, all that motivational crap flies out the window.
The first reaction anyone would have is, "Your kidding right?" The slightly prolonged silence on the other end brings another thought to mind. "This is a sick joke. I know it." And as the electric potential builds up in the mind you think desperately, "People only die in movies, or in other parts of the world, or in other towns, in other houses. Not here. Not in my time." And it starts to sink in. Because if truth were alterable, the endlessly intertwining alternate possibilities in the universe (as a result of changing whims and fancies of individuals) would lead to cataclysmic meltdown. So to balance the equation, some things are unalterable.
Like the fact that you cant see him ever again.
Because when you hear the phone ring, pick it up and hear that hollow voice telling you that so-and-so is not in THIS physical plane anymore, all that motivational crap flies out the window.
The first reaction anyone would have is, "Your kidding right?" The slightly prolonged silence on the other end brings another thought to mind. "This is a sick joke. I know it." And as the electric potential builds up in the mind you think desperately, "People only die in movies, or in other parts of the world, or in other towns, in other houses. Not here. Not in my time." And it starts to sink in. Because if truth were alterable, the endlessly intertwining alternate possibilities in the universe (as a result of changing whims and fancies of individuals) would lead to cataclysmic meltdown. So to balance the equation, some things are unalterable.
Like the fact that you cant see him ever again.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
My fifth attempt at creating a blog. Will this be a success? Or another shot at failure? Only the staggering mess left behind as the universe heads on inevitably towards exponential entropy will determine whether or not this particularly long-winded sentence will be passed on to succeeding generations of blind humans. Or, more simply, time will tell.
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